Everything you Need to Know About Sausage Stuffers — from SausageMania.com!

There are a few tricks to making sausages without stuffing them into casings, and it's also OK, of course, to make bulk sausage and cook the sausage in patties. But there is little as satisfying as turning out foot after foot of perfect sausages stuffed into natural casings. And for that alone, it's worth buying a stuffer.

Stuffers range from ludicrously basic to heavy-duty commercial machines capable of turning out hundreds of pounds of finished sausage an hour. Get a basic stuffer if you're planning to make only 5-10 lbs of sausage at a session. But for us, sausage making is a family-and-friends event that we hold several times a year, when we crank out — literally — 100 to 200 lbs. per session. For this you need a darn good stuffer!

Stuffers are basically huge syringes filled with sausage mix, and actuated by a piston. The piston can be moved by a hand crank, by a motor or by air or water pressure: the result is the same: as the piston moves down the cylinder filled with sausage mix, the mix is forced out through a stuffing horn — a long, narrow funnel — onto which you've loaded your casing. As the mix comes out, the casing flows off the stuffing horn with the mix inside of it, producing a tube of sauage, which is then twisted into links.

We tried several makes of stuffers. Our current stuffer is the Friedrich Dick 12 liter vertical crank-actuated stuffer, a simple but finely-made instrument, which comes in 9, 12 and 15 liter sizes. These are heavy machines, and expensive as well, so do not over-buy or you may end up with smething too heavy to move around easily.

Recently, a number of less expensive hand-cranked stuffers have come on the market, some even motorized. SausageMania cannot recommend any of these, as we've not tried them out. However, in considering a stuffer, one of the crucial parts is the O-ring, or seal around the piston head. If the machine is not precisely made, when high pressure is exerted by the piston on the mix (for example, when stuffing narrow sheep casings), you may get "blowback" of mix around the piston, filling the cylinder behind the piston with mix.